Tokens of Friendship
by AfewSentencesShortOfaParagraph
Summary: Clare Edwards' life is not exactly fun at the moment. He mom is marrying her ex-boyfriend's father- talk about awkward. But when Clare is cleaning her room and finds some old headphones she may realize that what she needs most is an old friend. One-shot


**Hello there, lovely people. I know there have been random speculations on what Clare has done with Eli's noise cancellation headphones before, but I wanted to take a crack at a short, cute, EClare one-shot based on a possible resolution to this little quirk of their relationship. The best kind of one-shot, no? **

**I'm going to try something different- 3****rd**** person narration. I hope it doesn't suck too badly. **

**This is set during the summer vacation the students are technically on right this very minute! You can choose how far into the summer it is, though. I don't own Degrassi; *insert sarcastic comment here*.**

"Clare, have you cleaned your room yet?" Helen yells up the stairs, just wishing her daughter would get out of bed. She never meant for her impending marriage to take such a toll on her relationship with Clare, but Helen is pretty sure Clare is depressed. As much as she tries, though, there doesn't seem to be anything Helen can do about it.

Upstairs, Clare rolls over in bed and groans; she's tired of her mother's constant nagging. It is times like these that Clare wishes she had her own house. "Mom, it's summer," Clare points out the obvious uselessly. Summers are designed specifically for lounging in bed till one in the afternoon and being last like life depends on it. Clare wonders why her mother doesn't understand this.

"I know, Clare-bear, but if it's not clean by the time I get home from work I'll force you to come out to dinner with Glen and me tonight," Helen threatens, but she doesn't think she is being unfair. After all, Helen has let Clare avoid her future stepfather all summer even though she wished Clare would give Glen a chance. Helen wants a stable family again, and she wants Clare to be happy.

Clare rolls her eyes at the use of her old nickname- it reminds her of Jenna and she's still kind of bitter, okay?- but she launches herself out of bed at the thought of enduring even a minute of awkwardness with her mother and Glen. She knows Glen isn't a bad guy, but she still doesn't like him. And, hey, that's her prerogative, thank you very much. Clare now knows her father wasn't treating her mother right, but that doesn't mean Glen should be allowed to waltz into the middle of her life and expect to magically take over the role of her father.

She is also still pretty upset that she had to give up Jake just so her mother could move on far too quickly. Clare thinks her mother should be taking things slow- she literally just got divorced, people- but, no, she insists on the marriage. Clare doesn't get why her mother's reckless behavior is costing her the only thing that was making her happy; life really isn't fair after all.

"Cleaning," Clare informs her mother halfheartedly before her mom grumbles some unintelligible approval and is out the door. Clare is alone at last; alone with plenty of time to sulk in her bitter, disapproving thoughts. Yeah, Clare knows it's a real productive use of her time.

After standing in the middle of her room still dressed in her pajamas for five minutes, Clare decides she has nothing better to do with her day, so she might as well tidy up. After she brushes her teeth and changes, Clare starts to pick up the clothes strewn around her room. It's not like Clare is a really messy person, so it doesn't take long for all the t-shirts to be folded, all the dresses hung up and all her polo's neatly ironed and stashed away in drawers until the start of the new school year.

Clare then makes her bed and plops down on top of it. She isn't really sure what else her mom wants from her, but she decides there is a lot of junk stashed on the floor of her closet and under her bed so she might as well go through it all and throw away anything she doesn't need. Her mom will be so proud…and, no, that wasn't sarcasm at all.

The first thing Clare finds is a box labeled '_Alli_' is flowery script. It has pictures that both Clare and Alli drew on the construction paper they pasted to cover the shoebox- a unicorn drawn by Alli, a big obnoxious heart by Clare and portraits the girls did of each other. It looks goofy, but Clare smiles fondly as she remember the afternoon they spent together constructing the box after reading about it in Sizzle-Teen magazine.

After Clare inspects every doodle she lifts the lid reverently and finds every note Alli and her have passed over the last two years of school. Some are simple, goofy and innocent; some are dark and depressing. But Clare reads every one…slightly embarrassed at the tears that leak out of her eyes as she reads a note she wrote Alli shortly after Clare's parents told her about the divorce. If only Alli were here now instead of at science camp; she would wrap her arms around Clare and tell her that no matter what, Alli was always on her side.

Clare realized that was all she really wanted- someone on her side.

But Jake had jumped ship the first opportunity he had, and her mom certainly wouldn't listen to Clare's- very logical- arguments for a wedding cancelation. Or, at the very least, a postponing of the wedding; the drab event happens in a few weeks and Clare has to be the maid of honor. So exciting! Again, there is no sarcasm tainting Clare's thoughts at all.

Yeah, it would be nice to have Alli around to tell her that she was absolutely merited in all her angst; Alli wouldn't make her feel like a whiny baby.

Having thoroughly depressed herself, Clare pushes the note aside, and notices a separate pile segregated from the rest by a rubber band binding. Clare wonders to herself why she set these notes aside, and carefully removes the rubber band before reading the first one of the stack.

Oh, yes, Clare vaguely remembers picking these notes out with care and setting them in the bottom of the box where no one would find them. This pile is different because not all the notes are with Alli, but they all have one thing in common…Eli.

They are about Eli, they are notes written between her and Eli and a few of the pieces of paper are short snippets of short stories Eli would randomly write for her and leave in her locker, in her lunch, slipped in her purse, tucked in her pocket…Clare loved finding those half-pieces of paper on which single, romantic scenes were scribbled hurriedly.

Clare reads them all now, smiling despite herself as she remembers how happy Eli had made her. Most of the stories are written with anonymous characters- just 'he' and 'she'. But Clare knows that Eli meant himself and Clare because he was gutsy enough to rewrite dates they went on from his point of view.

Yes, Eli had always been one to wear his reckless heart on his sleeve once he got to know her. That was, until he got too reckless, and Clare didn't know how to handle it. She wasn't equipped to make Eli's mental instability go away, and she didn't like being the single, most important person in Eli's life. She loved him, sure, but she was still in the process of finding out who she was…she couldn't support another person when she didn't even have her own needs sorted out.

And, of course, when they came back from Spring Break things began to go from bad to worse. And they were already pretty bad- he crashed his car into a wall so she wouldn't leave him. Talk about your drastic measures. That's what had scared her most- the thought that she might lose him for good because she was single-handedly driving him toward insanity. Obviously she had to walk away so he could get help for himself. The night after she left him in the hospital and went back to the dance…she pretended to be okay for everyone's sake. She had to pretend to be normal, blaze so she wouldn't worry Adam and Alli and her mom. But…once she was home and in bed…Clare cried like she never had before. Clare cried herself to sleep every night of Spring Break, and a shudder slides down her spine as she remembers late night phone calls to Adam just to check that Eli was still alive.

She felt like she had gone to hell and back, but she hadn't realized that she had yet to endure the worst of it. Clare wraps the notes back up and shoves everything back into the box. She doesn't let herself think about everything that had happened since Spring Break. Watching Eli slowly reach rock bottom, not to mention having to write regular updates about it in the school paper, was hard enough to live through once. Then, of course, she doesn't like to let herself think about Jake. He tries to text her every day, but Clare doesn't have anything to say to him, and she doesn't want to hear whatever it is that he has to say.

At least with Eli she feels like their relationship is on the mend. With Jake…well, Clare still just does not look forward to the wedding.

Clare pushes the box of notes away altogether and throws herself into tidying wholeheartedly. She needs something to distract her from her pitiful life now.

Eventually, Clare can see the bottom of her closet floor again, and she feels an ironic sense of accomplishment. Clare doesn't want to admit it, but her mom was right about her needing to clean. The experience was feeling kind of cathartic for Clare. She needed to rid her life of access junk.

Clare decides it's time to move onto her bed, so she ducks under the bed posts and starts to toss all the items out from under the dusty space without a second look to them. She wiggles her way out from under the bed once she's tossed everything into a pile, and starts to comb through the dusty items.

The first thing Clare's fingers touch is a black t-shirt. Clare unfolds it to find a very old Dead Hand shirt Eli gave her after a water gun fight Eli, Adam and she had in Eli's backyard shortly after they turned in their Romeo and Juliet project. Clare has slept in the shirt several times, but Eli's stubborn aroma has never even been distilled. Clare realizes she's touching her lips lightly and smiling to herself again…she can't help but think of the first kiss she shared with Eli because of the Romeo and Juliet project. He was so dark and mysterious back then, but he had been her bestest of best friends.

Clare folds the t-shirt; she tells herself that Eli hasn't missed it yet, so there isn't any harm in keeping it.

Next, something shiny catches Clare's eye, and she bends over to pick up an earring meant for her cartilage. She remembers the sting as the gun went off, but mostly Clare remembers the way Eli's hand curled around hers as they experienced the some shot of pain in the same spot on their ears. The matching piercings were the symbol of their very successful and very original first date.

Clare walks over to the mirror and is amazed to see the hole has yet to close all the way. It hurts a bit, okay it hurts a lot, but Clare manages to get the ring through the hole. Her ear is all red, but Clare smiles at her reflection. Why are all her Eli memories stashed under the bed?

Clare laughs at the symbolism of it all, but walks back to the pile and starts to go through the rest of the items one by one. There is a mix CD the Eli made Clare to educate her taste in music, and the irrelevant binder from Eli's room that Clare didn't have a heart to throw away even though she made Eli believe that she had for the sake of his hoarding. There is the Gothic Tales magazine where Stalker Angel is published and there is Eli's history final. He actually wrote an essay about an ostrich starting World War Two before going on to truthfully answer the question. When Clare had found the test stuffed in his backpack she had laughed so long and hard that she couldn't bear to part ways with it. Eli had such a great sense of humor.

There are a lot of little artifacts that would mean nothing to a stranger, but Clare realizes they mean everything to her. She has a museum of Eli's personality under her bed, and she thinks that should be a little creepy, but she can't help but feel happy that she has something to remind her of the simpler times.

And that is when Clare's eyes fall on the last item in the pile- a set of headphones. They are noise cancellation headphones to be specific, and she remembers using them almost every night for a month. Her parents would start to shout, and Clare would reach for the bulky set of headwear, slipping them over hear ears, and smiling to herself as she got lost in the music…and speculating on Eli's whereabouts. She remembers that every time she looked at the headphones, Clare thought of Eli, and she would always wonder if he was thinking of her.

With that, Clare is off running.

Clare isn't really sure what the force is that propels her forward, but she doesn't fight it and she doesn't stop to think about it. All she knows is she's still clutching the headphones tightly in her hands, and she won't let go.

When Clare reaches Eli's door she almost turns around. She hasn't talked to him since they spent the night in the hospital watching over Adam. She doesn't know what to do, or why she is even here in the first place, but she turns around to leave. But she ran all this way…and she really just wants to show Eli that she remembers; that their time together has not been forgotten as he might think.

Clare could imagine herself capable of skipping off into the sunset with someone else…Eli entirely forgotten. In fact, she had _tried_ to do that, but it didn't work out well.

So, maybe Clare could knock on the door and take it from there. She could just be stopping by to see how Eli was doing. Clare slowly turns around and starts to walk back toward the front steps when the door swings open as if it has a mind of its own.

"I'm just going to take a walk in the park, Cece. I'll be back for dinner; don't worry."

Clare can hear the smirk in Eli's voice as he sarcastically assures his mom that he can go for a walk without her having to worry about him doing something stupid. He's decided to put off on stupidity for at least a month; he's giving it up for lent…insert any kind of sarcastic joke as you please.

Clare feels like a deer in the headlights as Eli turns around to find her standing there with his old headphones in her fist so tightly that her knuckles are white with the effort of holding on.

They stare at each other for an immeasurable amount of time- Eli looks surprised and pleased and Clare is not sure what her face looks like from the outside. She feels stuck, though.

Finally, Eli clears his throat and Clare jolts out of her state of shock. "Um, hi," she greets him brilliantly.

"Hello," he responds, his green eyes glint mischievously and Clare feels as though she's being transported back to their equally awkward first meeting…his eyes had the same sparkle in them back then, too. "Is there a reason you're standing on my lawn staring at me like you've seen a ghost?"

"Um…yes."

That's as far as Clare gets though, because there is a reason, but she's not so sure what it is.

"Right," Eli shifts his weight uncomfortably before looking Clare in the eye and smiling a genuine, beautiful Eli smile. "Want to come for a walk with me?"

"A walk sounds nice," Clare nods her head eagerly, needing some time to catch her breath and just figure out what she came to say.

So they start out silently, walking side by side comfortably. They were never ones who felt it necessary to fill every second with chatter. Eli and Clare knew how to appreciate the value of silent conversations. Sometimes they were capable of saying more than the verbal ones.

Eventually though, after they reach a part of the park that Clare has never seen before, Eli speaks up. "You kind of look like hell," he points out matter-of-factly. Clare hates him for a fleeting second for being so observant.

"Yeah, well, life hasn't exactly been a field of daisies for me these past few months."

"Life rarely is," Eli chuckles softly, "but that doesn't automatically make it hell. Usually life can still be enjoyed whether you're treading a field of daisies or a field of shit. So what's up with you?"

Clare fiddles with the headphones, not wanting to look Eli in the eye because she knows he will be able to read a lot there- a lot more than she wants him to. "I guess the wedding plans are getting to me," Clare finally gives in after a prolonged pause. Anyone could hear the distaste in her voice, but only people who know her well, like Eli, would be able to hear the pain.

"Adam told me you get to be the maid of honor; I bet you're thrilled."

Yeah, Eli still knows Clare better than most people, and that pleases Clare as much as it scares the crap out of her. Because all the space between them should have changed Eli's ability to pick up on Clare's unspoken thoughts…but it hasn't.

"Thrilled," she whispers under her breath before quickly changing the subject. "I cleaned my room today."

"I was wondering why you were holding my headphones," Eli laughs loudly, and Clare holds the headphones out to him as an offer.

"Sorry I showed up unannounced," Clare starts as Eli takes the headphones from Clare's hands to inspect them. As he does so, his hand brushes Clare's and she jumps a little at the contact. "I was going through my old things and I found a lot of your stuff under my bed…a shirt, my earring and these headphones. I don't know why I ran all the way to your house, though. I guess I was just…well I was thinking about old times…and, I, well…thank you, Eli."

"For what?" Eli is perplexed as to what she could be thanking him for that has to do with his old stuff being in her room.

"For being there when no one else was," Clare whispers.

Eli laughs. "No problem, Edwards. It's not like you didn't reciprocate." Eli tries to hand back the headphones, but Clare shakes her head.

"You keep them; they are yours after all."

Eli grabs Clare's hand and forces her to take back the memento. "Nonsense; I gave them to you for a reason. Something tells me you still need them more than I do. Besides, I kind of like the idea that you still have the little parts of us to remind you of what we had." Clare just blushes as Eli's hand lingers a second longer than necessary.

"Okay…thanks," Clare says, hugging the headphones close to her chest. "How are you doing…how's, um, therapy and stuff?"

"Great," Eli responds sincerely and gives Clare a brilliant smile. "As long as I remember to take my meds I don't even think about murdering people."

"That wasn't funny," Clare points out, but she can't quite keep the smile off her face.

"Sure it was," Eli winks, cocky as ever. "But, no, I won't lie- it can get a little difficult. It's a hard thing to come to terms with…being bipolar, but it makes sense. I'm just glad to be fixing the problem. I really needed the help, and Cece and Bullfrog are really supportive. So that makes it easier."

Clare just nods along, happy to find a peace etched into Eli's features that she has never seen before. "I've missed you," she admits before she can stop the thoughts in her brain from morphing into sentences that come out of her mouth.

"I'm always right down the corner, Clare- whenever you need me, and even when you don't."

And that's it; that's the force that drove Clare to run several blocks just to see Eli- unconditional friendship. Clare knows their relationship will never be perfect, but she still cares about Eli. Eli, although he lost himself for an amount of time in the middle, has always been Clare's friend. That didn't change when they split, or when they started dating or even when Clare was with Jake. Eli has always her constant…he is in her life for good whether she wants him to be or not…so it was a good thing that she wants it.

Clare clutches the concrete evidence of their friendship in the form of headphones closer to her chest as she realizes that she doesn't need Alli to come home for someone to always be on her side.

Eli is, and always will be, her number one ally.

Clare subtly wraps her hand around Eli's, and he doesn't protest as they continue to walk through the slowly darkening park. They talk of times they have shared, and the many more times they hope to create in the future, and Clare feels the bitter melt away in drops, leaving room for a new emotion:

Hope.

**I should be updating Bad Sign and Broken Pieces soon. And after that I will focus on the other fictions I have started. **

**This just kind of came into my head and I wanted to write it. How is it; is it awful? **

**Thank you for reading!**


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